Thanksgiving is America's weirdest holiday.

Happy day before Thanksgiving, fellow SpaceHey-ers. For those who live outside the US and Canada, Thanksgiving is annual celebration at the end of the harvest season where you give thanks for the blessings of the harvest and of the proceeding year and is a time to be with your loved ones, though there are similarly named harvest festival holidays in other parts of the world. But I'll be talking about the odd quirks of the American holiday. 

Supposedly, there was more than one "First Thanksgiving". There was the more well known one involving the Mayflower pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts, but there was another before that in 1619, when settlers from England arrived at what was called Berkeley Hundred in what is now Charles City County, Virginia, near Richmond. Upon the arrival of the 39 settlers on December 4, 1619, the Virginia Company of London declared a day of "the day of our ships arrival . . . shall be yearly and perpetually kept as a day of Thanksgiving." establishing the tradition two years before the Mayflower pilgrims did so. Of course, there was still wars with the Natives not long afterwards, but that's another story. 

As for food, well, the food is to recreate the bountiful harvest that the settlers enjoyed and is meant to be shared with those closest to you. Of course, a lot us do make pigs of ourselves. Not to mention that some of your family may not be of the same political mindset, which leads to some odd dinner conversation. 

Another weird thing associated with Thanksgiving is football. The first Thanksgiving Day football game took place in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving Day 1869, less than two weeks after Rutgers defeated Princeton in New Brunswick, New Jersey in what is widely recognized as the first intercollegiate football game in the United States, and only six years after Abraham Lincoln declared the first fixed national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863. On November 17, a Philadelphia newspaper promoted a football game between two cricket clubs. By the time the NFL began in 1920, football on Thanksgiving had an institution that it was a given the NFL would follow suit. 

Finally, the weirdest thing associated with Thanksgiving is Black Friday, which is the day after and the official beginning of the Christmas shopping season for those who live outside the United States or only know about it from South Park. This tradition began with Santa Claus appearing the end of Thanksgiving Day parades, mostly ones sponsored by major retailers such as Eaton's in Toronto starting in 1905 and especially Macy's in New York City starting in 1924. The first instance of the term "Black Friday" began being used as early as 1951 or 1952, referring to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving to get a four-day weekend. Around the same time, police in Philadelphia and in Rochester, New York used the term to describe the hellish traffic conditions accompanying the start of the Christmas shopping season. The use of the phrase started to spread slowly when a 1975 New York Times article referred to Black Friday as the "busiest shopping and traffic day of the year". By the early 1980s, another variation of the term was based on the idea that retailers operated at losses for most of the year only to make most of their profits during the Holiday season. Historically bookkeepers marked losses in financial records in red ink and profits in black ink. Starting in the 21st century, as e-commerce began to become the norm, online retailers such as Amazon have been offering Black Friday deals before the actual Black Friday, in addition to things such as Cyber Monday. Of course, there has been several reports of violence at Black Friday events in the past, which has led to the day being mocked in pop culture, most notably on South Park, but thanks to the rise of online shopping, accelerated by the COVID pandemic, Black Friday may become a thing of the past, which might not be so bad. 

So there you have it. Thanksgiving is America's weirdest holiday. But then again, America is a weird country. And I wouldn't have it any other way.